“My first professional audition was for a commercial,” remembers Kal Penn. “I walk in the room and the casting director asked me where my turban was.” Caught off guard, the Indian American actor tried to explain that not all Indians wear turbans, but the casting director wasn’t hearing any of it. She straight away asked him to put a bedsheet on his head.
“It wasn’t [cultural] ignorance,” Penn says. “She knew what she was talking about.”
What a difference several years makes. With the national release this weekend of New Line’s Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, Penn and co-star John Cho (Better Luck Tomorrow) are poised to become that rarity in Hollywood — Asian Pacific American leading men.
In the film, best friends and 24/7 stoners Harold (Cho) and Kumar (Penn) embark on a pot-induced journey to find White Castle hamburgers. Along the way, they face various mishaps including a Korean-students social event run amok, racist police and an escaped cheetah on the loose.
The two form a modern-day comic duo in the tradition of Abbott and Costello, or more appropriately, Cheech and Chong. And they are both APA men who have healthy sex drives and no accents, and are not foreigners, studious geeks, or any of the other traditional Asian male stereotypes created by Hollywood.
“Harold and Kumar is a tremendously rare feat,” says Katy Lim, vice president of Penn Station Entertainment (producers of the upcoming Constantine starring hapa Keanu Reeves). “This film portrays an Indian American and a Korean American as two funny, fully realized heroes who never slip into caricatures.”
Which makes it all the more amazing that the film was the brainchild of two young Jewish writers from New Jersey.
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg had just sold their first script, Filthy, to MGM and suddenly found themselves as much-sought-after comedy script doctors re-writing movies like Scary Movie 3. They decided they wanted to write a film like American Pie — a youth comedy that spoke to their experiences and those of the friends they grew up with. But they also wanted to write a script that felt fresh.
They turned to the APA experiences and friends of their youth, but the representations they saw of these characters onscreen just weren’t like any of the people they knew.
“[APAs] were usually portrayed as nerdy or downright dumb, with thick accents, and usually seen delivering food,” Schlossberg says. “They were not like the Asian guys I knew who may have had some cultural differences, but were basically the same as us.”
They decided to model Harold and Kumar after the APA buddies they grew up with (including their real-life best friend, Harold Lee).
The writers were also impressed by Cho’s small but memorable performance as the MILF guy in the American Pie trilogy and pegged him as the ideal Harold.
“Jon Hurwitz approached me and told me he had written a movie with me in mind,” Cho remembers. “My first reaction was, ‘Who is this white guy? What has he done?’ I wondered if the part was going to be a drag and I was very cautious.”
But as soon as he read the script, Cho realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It brought up other reservations, however.
“A Hollywood movie with two Asian [Pacific] American male leads? I didn’t think the film would ever get made,” Cho says. “Even while it was being made, I couldn’t believe it.”
Penn had a similar reaction when he met the two writers at a mutual friend’s party. “But sure enough,” he recalls, “they sold the script two weeks later to Senator International and I was blown away.”
Soon, New Line Cinema also came on board as the film’s distributor.
“We expected resistance,” Hurwitz says. “Our friends were concerned for us because they knew Hollywood doesn’t make films with [APA] leads. But our thinking was if we write one that’s good enough and mainstream enough, we would have a chance.”
To their surprise, neither the producers nor the studio asked them to change the characters’ ethnicity, though the writers joked that by the production time, it would turn into David and Jason Go To McDonald’s.
And it was this fresh take on a familiar genre that attracted director Danny Leiner of Dude, Where’s My Car? fame.
“The script came across my desk and I wasn’t even interested in reading it,” Leiner says. “I didn’t want to do another broad comedy. But I was impressed by the writing, and the fact that it was two Asian [Pacific] American guys was a perspective I haven’t seen before. That was a real plus.”
The Korean-born Cho began acting while a student at the University of California Berkeley. His first professional job was appearing in the all-APA stage version of The Woman Warrior at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
“Seeing all these [APA] actors doing this made me realize I could pursue an acting career too,” Cho says.
He moved down to Los Angeles and started booking jobs, including a role in last year’s indie hit Better Luck Tomorrow and the television series Off Centre. This fall he will appear on the NBC show The Men’s Room and the new CD from his band, Left Of Zed, is available on its website.
Penn got bit by the acting bug early on, but didn’t think a career in the arts was viable because he never saw anyone who looked like him on TV or the big screen.
“Then in eighth grade, I saw Mississippi Masala,” he recalls. “That was the first time I saw South Asians portrayed accurately. It was empowering and I thought to myself, ‘I think I can do this!’”
Penn went on to appear in films like Malibu’s Most Wanted and Van Wilder and will next appear in the Disney film A Lot Like Love with Ashton Kutcher, and Son of the Mask with his friend Jamie Kennedy (who has a cameo in Harold and Kumar).
Penn and Cho checked each other out before starting the film.
“I called around to see if anyone knew John,” Penn says. “‘What do you know about him? Is he cool?’ And of course, he was. When we first met, one of the first conversations we had was about how significant this film was for us as Asian [Pacific] Americans, and I think we both sighed with relief when we realized the other guy got it. The worst thing would have been to spend months with a guy who didn’t ‘get it.’”
The two actors are very aware that all eyes, both within the community and in Hollywood, are on them and their film. They know that Harold and Kumar’s box-office performance may determine whether more projects with leading, three-dimensional roles for APAs get made.
“This is our big at bat fiscally,” Cho says. “Hollywood has put out a product with two [APA] leads and the question is, Will audiences vote for it?”
Although there seems to be a growing wave of interest in the film from APAs, particularly younger ones, if Internet postings are any indication, the portrayal of these two guys as pot-smoking party dudes might offend some in the community.
But others like Visual Communications’ Abe Ferrer, who produces the annual Asian American VC Filmfest in Los Angeles, feels the impact of the film will be minimal.
“I don’t think the film warrants so much attention either positive or negative,” Ferrer says. “I’d be surprised if people in the community gush about this as some major shift in the landscape of film and American [culture].”
But whether it signals a change in how Hollywood approaches APA stories and characters — or it just turns out to be a minor blip with no significant long-term effect (as The Joy Luck Club was) — at least one of the film’s players has already put his experience in perspective.
“I know something like this may not come around again,” Cho says. “I’m just grateful that I had the chance to be a part of something so special.”